Making sense: The work of Eugene Gendlin

Abstract

Challenging the rationalism of his time, Pascal (1958: 78) proclaimed a different logic: "The heart has its reasons," he wrote, "which reason does not know." Disturbed by the skepticism that was beginning to take hold in the seventeenth century, he wanted to argue for a logic of the heart, a discourse born of feeling, that could make sense out of connections that reason refuses to recognize. Our own century is of course very different from Pascal's. And yet, we still seem to need the Pascalian reminder. Perhaps no-one has given the grain of truth in Pascal's assertion a more timely, more convincing demon? stration than Eugene Gendlin. To be sure, there is a crucial difference between Pascal and Gendlin: Gendlin's work involves not only a new understanding of language, of how language works, but also a new way or new ways ? of using language, to articulate certain roles that the body performs in the for? mation of meanings. Gendlin's thinking works with a different kind of experience: something that he calls our "bodily felt sense" of the situations in which we find our? selves. His theory of language ? and the way he actually works with words ? show us how new meanings can be drawn from a bodily felt sense. Everyone today, even J?rgen Habermas, the contemporary standard-bearer of the legacy of Enlightenment rationalism, speaks of the need to think of reason as intersubjective and embodied; but they all leave the question of what, very concretely and very precisely, this actually means and involves, utterly unanswered. With an extraordinary respect for embodied experience, Gendlin is almost alone in exploring the role of the body in the context of an excitingly new theory and practice of language.